LH Opens 'Online Platform' Allowing Anyone to Participate in Smart City Development

Smart City Living Lab Online Platform Screen in Hwaseong Dongtan 2 (Provided by LH)

[Asia Economy Reporter Chunhee Lee] Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH) is launching an online platform project for the 'Smart City Living Lab' that allows citizens to directly participate in smart city development.

On the 27th, LH announced the opening of the 'Dongtan 2 Smart City Living Lab' online platform. This project targets the Dongtan 4?5-dong area within Dongtan 2 New Town, where LH, local governments, and citizens collaboratively identify regional issues and solve them using smart technologies.

The Smart City Living Lab project officially began last April with the recruitment of citizen participants, but due to restrictions on gathering opinions through offline meetings caused by the spread of COVID-19, the online platform was established to communicate with citizens more conveniently and safely.

The newly launched online platform provides an overview of the living lab and updates on its progress, allowing users to propose ideas in various fields such as transportation, safety, health, and environment. In particular, it enables users to indicate the exact location of their proposals on a map and includes an electronic voting feature to facilitate smooth opinion collection.

Additionally, a menu has been prepared for companies to promote smart technologies, making it easier for citizens to access new smart technologies. It is also planned to be used as a space for win-win growth, where small and medium-sized enterprises with excellent technologies can gain opportunities to participate in the living lab project.

Through this online platform, not only the existing citizen participants but also any residents of Dongtan 4?5-dong, the project target area, can propose ideas and use the services. LH plans to transfer the online platform to Hwaseong City after the Smart City Living Lab project concludes, expecting this platform to become the foundation of a living lab network encompassing the entire Hwaseong City in the future.

Han Byunghong, head of LH's Smart City Headquarters, said, "Through the online platform, we expect more citizens to participate in this project by overcoming the difficulties of face-to-face meetings caused by COVID-19 and freely proposing opinions regardless of time and place."